As we continue to look at cinematic art and turn to Garrett Bradley’s short film "America," our questions around representation and replication of visual logic (the gaze) persist. Bradley seems keenly aware of this issue at the start of her film, which begins with a moment of transition from still images to moving ones. By freezing images from "Lime Kiln Field Day" then progressing to the scene of a merry-go-round, Bradley announces that her work will not only have something to say about black life, here shown at play, but about its relation to cinema as an art form. In addition to the merry-go-round, which recalls perhaps the zoopraxiscope, an early incarnation of cinema that projected image through light and circular motion, we could say that Bradley invokes a cinematographic style and engages particular imagery throughout "America" that highlight filmic qualities of light and shadow, for instance a white screen painted with flowers behind which dark figures play or the dreamlike rotation of disco balls. This is to say that she stages the crisis that black life—intramural black life, that is, for much of her runtime—poses both for the categories of Man or Nation, but moreover for cinema itself as a medium whose very language was elaborated in and as a racializing or racialized logic.
To repeat what Keeling said, an “unequal calculus of visibility distribution” mandates that entry into the domain of visibility, or wielding cinema as a racialized director, may cost in effect the reproduction of power and the visual logics (the gaze again) that prop it up. To recall Keeling once more who invokes Grace Hong, Bradley may then engage, perhaps, the notion of queer production insofar as she imagines an alternative history of black life in and beyond its filmic representation. By reimagining the American past and black life within that history, she gestures toward the possibility that, against the “media ecology” of blackness, as Keeling put it, or the “Weather” as Sharpe wrote, the futurity endemic to these atmospheric terms could hold otherwise than what the cinema as a racial logic historically demands.
In the spirit of revisiting some of the terminology we’ve compiled so far this term, I’d like to return to Wesley Brown’s “tragic magic” as described by Author Jafa in Black Visual Intonation:
What does Wesley Brown’s “tragic magic” mean when he says, “I played in a Bar Mitzvah band. And it was a great job until I got hit by that tragic magic, and I started playing a little bit before the beat, a little bit behind the beat. I couldn’t help myself. I lost the job.”
I’m interested in the compulsion implied by “I couldn’t help myself.” I find a similar compulsion in Dionne Brand’s “Verso 4,” who cannot help but to traverse the same furrow in time over and over again. The sentence that begins the Verso is like an itch that she just can’t quite scratch; or rather, an itch that—once scratched—results in a new, unforeseeable and unexpected pleasure in some surprising part of the body, and never that part with the itch you hoped to satisfy.
If I were to define “Tragic Magic” as a storytelling strategy—whether your mode of telling is film, image, or literary—I would borrow from Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” and describe it as the compulsion to fail the “requirements of narrative” and thus also “the fictions of history” (Hartman 10). By “failing” to follow the terminus of her own narrative, Dionne Brand refuses to close the gaps and delineate the thread between this itch and that scratch. With what Hartman calls “narrative restraint,” Brand opens her readers to the tragic magic of opacity and excess.
But again, what do we make of this compulsion? Do we read the repeated return to the white cotton, the revolving doors, the spoken refrains in Garrett Bradley’s film “America” as compulsive? Must it be in order for us to deem it as being “hit by” a kind of tragic magic?
“Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive?” (Hartman 11).
Taking this question from “Venus in Two Acts” as our point of departure, we have drafted the following questions and compiled the additional materials listed below to help shape the dialogue we will have tomorrow together. Please review them at your convenience and reflect beforehand or throughout our short presentation tomorrow when we will return to these guiding questions and outline the tensions, repetitions, erasures, and fabulations that motivated the directions our collaborative presentation has taken and will continue to take with your added input:
1. What does structuring the archive around quotidian black life (as opposed to death, racialization, the law, accounting, authority, knowledge, etc.) look like? 2. What does it mean for a work to be both an archive and a project of critical fabulation? 3. How might the archive be exceeded? 4. How can we engage with the archive in a way that acknowledges and refuses the complicity of archival structures and knowledge formation in the foundational violence of slavery? 5. What is it to break the relationship between the past and present that the archive presupposes/imposes? (bonus question): what is the pedagogical value of the archive or considering the archive in the ways “Venus in Two Acts” asks of us?
The flickering visual noise or static of film stock (graininess, scratches, blips, and flashes of light), its excess and its transient opacities, is ubiquitous in a film like "Lime Kiln Field Day." A practice of looking structured around the transparency of the relation between viewer and image would strive to tune out these scratches, grains, blips, and flashes, even though they inflect the texture and temporality of moving images and worry the note just as much as varying frame rates. America seems to ask us to tune into that noise, just like the girl who tunes into the radio frequency that flickers between Amiri Baraka’s demand for something more real than reality (“…reality is an excerpt on Television… What I want is me. For real”) and the song’s refrain of the “real gone” as in an out-of-the-field home run but also, maybe, as the really-not-there of loss (“Yes, Yes Jackie [Robinson]’s real gone”). If this static is not stable, as one definition of static would suggest, its disturbance is nonetheless constant. Its pervasiveness gestures toward an ambience (perhaps related to the weather via Sharpe) that simultaneously marks the limits of visibility offered through the medium of film stock yet also affords a way to begin imagining the textures of visual noise as some aspect of the unpreserved archive that remains invisible (insofar as we do not have access to these films) yet which would have been a constitutive aspect of all these lost films, given the material (in this case, rendered animal fat, which introduce another dimension of violence to consider when viewing any cinematic archive of the era) available to render images in this period.
If we think of "America" as an experiment in critical fabulation, then we could consider ways that the film’s attunement to static ambience might take up what Saidiya Hartman considers an ethical and methodological imperative “to respect black noise, the shrieks, the moans, the nonsense, and the opacity, which are always in excess of legibility and of the law and which hint at and embody aspirations that are wildly utopian, derelict to capitalism, and antithetical to its attendant discourse of Man” (12). Of course, the film itself is comprised of characters and scenes that are integral to Bradley’s efforts to imagine some possible and probable subjects of films in the era and the work of representation they become involved in. At the same time, "America" brims with flickering lights and sounds that seem to invaginate "Lime Kiln Field Day’s" static frequencies and the abyss of the unpreserved cinematic archive. This rendering of flickering what might be called visual, sonic, and haptic scintillations. Where it transpires, these scintillations could be a way of cutting and augmenting (like Moten) what lies in the wake of this abyss; they could be an attempt to cut and keep the excess within the frame (like Micheaux) as a way of oscillating (like Sharpe) between imaging and imagining what or who one looks with, through, and after (Moten and Keeley); it perhaps is a way of preferring “both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling” (Hartman 11). Here, I offer “scintillation” as a possible term that attempts to look through, with, and after a mosaic or murmuration of that which sparkles, crackles, glimmers, twinkles, chirps (of insects, birds, computers), drips, scratches, creaks, and flutters as possible transient glimpses of “embod[ied] aspirations” that are different yet not separate from each other in their rapid fluctuations (Hartman, OED “scintillation”).
The transience of these scintillations also seem related to visual and sonic turnings and twirlings, which render (which can also carries a sense of returning and the giving of thanks in return for receiving some generosity) a temporality of repetition, returning, and the practice of giving thanks in gathering in some shared grace. Scintillation and turning frequently appear and are celebrated together: the spinning lights of disco balls at roller rink; the sequins of the baton twirler’s outfit; the successive chirps of birds and insects; the repeated snippets of “America versus the United States” and briefly surface from the static; the glitter of the baptismal water that ebbs and flows like the shimmering shadows of the trees that dance over the "Lime Kiln Club’s" parade; the glimmer of sunlight on the revolving merry-go-round. I don’t know what to make of these frequencies, their intervals, their scintillations, other than to say that "America" gestures in excess of the constitutive limits of the archive it engages even as it dwells immanent to frames available to conjure this articulation. This gesture acts as another mode of imagining and listening to the static frequencies that strain visions of the impossibilities and possibilities of black life.
What gaps are left by an "annihilating violence"? How "to dramatize the production of nothing"? (Hartman 4). These are questions I had in my mind while watching Garrett Bradley's "America". Like Ben, I also was struck by this passage from "Venus in Two Acts": "Narrative restraint, the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure, is a requirement of this method, as is the imperative to respect black noise - the shrieks, the moans, the nonsense, and the opacity...which hint at and embody aspirations that are wildly utopian, derelict to capitalism, and antithetical to its attendant discourse of Man” (12).
The white noise in Garrett Bradley’s "America" is actually black noise. White noise, according to this Wikipedia entry, is defined as: "the 'sh' noise produced by a signal containing all audible frequencies of vibration—is sometimes used as a colloquialism to describe a backdrop of ambient sound, creating an indistinct commotion, seamless in such way no specific sounds composing it as a continuum can be isolated as a veritable instance of some defined familiar sound so that masks or obliterates underlying information. "
I find this definition of white noise fascinating and incredibly helpful in thinking about "America", especially the first and last lines: “a signal containing all audible frequencies of vibration...that masks or obliterates underlying information.” In this one definition, black/white noise comprises both plentitude and a force of annihilation.
Black/white noise comprises much of "America’s" soundscape, and its slight disjointedness from the actions being shown produces an unnerving effect.. As if the sounds were coming from somewhere else. (It reminded me, a little, of how Red snaps on counts 1 and 3 to a song during a car ride in Jordan "Us" instead of beats 2 and 4, because she grew up Tethered and thus wouldn’t know that people ‘above ground’ learned to snap their fingers on counts 2 and 4.)
The tearing, in particular, sounds like black noise to me. The tearing sound of the white, cotton cloth (around 2”55’ in the film) immediately made me think of the beginning and closing scenes in Octavia Butler’s "Kindred" when Dana loses her arm, presumably because her white master Rufus grabs her wrist as she time-travels from the 1820s to her present day--a tear in time and history that, as Hartman writes, calls to the fore that “the arrangements of power occlude the very object that we desire to rescue” (14). The past stretches into the present and writes the future while those in the present recognise “that some part of the self is missing” (Hartman 14). Similarly, when the young girl tunes the radio to much static, I think she is actually craning her ear to hear the black noise.
In our return to Lime Kiln Field Day via America, I was struck by the overlapping movement and stillness at work in the first several minutes of the film. Bradley begins her film with still images against a sonic backdrop of movement: the sound of a door opening and closing, the crossing over and across a threshold whose visual material is withheld from the audience. But the first moving images in the film continue to play with movement and stillness. Bert Williams and his partner ride the carousel, in constant movement but never going anywhere, if one is watching with the imperative to move forward. What particularly interested me in this rewatching of Williams, however, is how after thirty seconds of circling around on the wooden horse, he reaches out and grabs a small white ring.
This reaching outside of the circumscribed path led me to think back to Sharpe’s description of the weather as singularity, as that which draws everything around it. Wake work takes place on the edges of the singularity, and Williams reaching out to grab the ring seems almost like a kind of proto-wake work: an insistence that the cyclic movement of the carousel (which compels its riders to keep their arms and legs inside the ride until it has come to a complete stop) can in fact be momentarily broken.
If, following the second question that Heather, Lilith, Sherena, Susana, and Ricardo raise, if we consider America both archive and critical fabulation, is this particular footage of Williams used to mark the move from archive to fabulation?
In thinking of Garrett Bradley’s ‘America’ alongside “Venus in Two Acts,” I’m drawn back to our discussions in the joint meeting at Columbia (seems like so long ago!) around questions of the chronicle versus narrative-developmental schema. Referring specifically to the visible cuts that act as intervals in ‘Lime Kiln Field Day,’ we pondered whether an “archival assembly” as a methodology with curatorial intention always points to that which is left out—a subjunctive temporality of form that outlines the possibilities of what could have been. Given the peculiar nature of the cuts in ‘Lime Kiln’ by virtue of their slowed-down frame rate and the indistinguishability between their state as still or moving images, I want to add a question. Both in this film and in light of the other works of assemblage that we’ve watched throughout the seminar, is there a tendency to assign the quality of chronicle to the photograph, and narrative to film? How do we re-consider these forms of storytelling in light of previous conversations around the intensity of the cinematic as opposed to the theatrical?
These narrative tensions play out to a significant degree in Bradley’s film, which mines the archive to reconstruct a kind of future history, perhaps enacting what Hartman calls jeopardizing the event (11). The film does this by channeling hegemonic signifiers like the white cloth or boy scout and military uniforms through purposefully obscuring visual tools of the mirror or camera glare, and sonic ones such as the weaving in and out of diegetic soundscapes and the voiceover. The film, in its refusal to let image and sound converge perfectly, to linger on tonalities of skin, cloth, and gravity-defying daggers as much as on human figures, performs a kind of flattening that “Venus in Two Acts” describes as “confusing narrators and speakers … to topple the hierarchy of discourse, and to engulf authorized speech in the clash of voices” (12). This submersion of voices, the sound of symphonic drone notes, the unfulfilled aural moment of a hammer hitting an anvil, and the refrain which questions the difference between America and the United States proffers a new assembly of the archive by listening for the interval rather than for narrative emphasis. Bradley thus performs a practice of black annotation as put forth by Christina Sharpe, an act of (re)writing a history that is at once a cut between chronicle and progressive development.
I’m not entirely convinced, however, as to how the mixing of footage and stills from ‘Lime Kiln’ functions in the assemblage of the film, and whether its appearances are meant to “haunt the present” (Hartman 5). In an interview with Artforum, Bradley explains that she became interested in the catalytic potential of ‘Lime Kiln’ after learning from a Library of Congress survey that seventy percent of films made between 1912 and 1929 went missing. She thus begins to imagine, taking 1913’s ‘Lime Kiln’ as a germinating point, an alternative archive of media surrounding black life, bringing us back to the question of subjunctive temporality and what can be made possible through assembly.
Recently, I have been thinking about the object, person, experience, letter, etc. that was not “put to rest” and does not want to be found.
Two initial scattered thoughts: -I hear the aquatic dream sounds of Isaac Julien’s 1989 Looking for Langston in the opening scenes of Garrett Bradley's America. I place this in conversation with “The task of writing the impossible, (not the fanciful or the utopian but ‘histories rendered unreal and fantastic’)” (Hartman 14). -I am thinking about America’s relation to touch, water, the hands, and mouth. Our moment’s constant hand washing places self in relation and then in communion with water and soap in frenzied touch.
I am interested in the practice of searching or looking for something with the latent desire of to make sense of one’s own self in relation. Professor Hartman asks, “Why subject the dead to new dangers and to a second order of violence?” (5). There could be two, amongst many, rather choppy and incomplete responses: 1.) to make right a horrific wrong 2.) to have more narratives of the dispossessed present. They are both sticky with ethics but, more uneasily perhaps, they cycle around possession. That is, to have and to hold an archive, regardless of the absences and presences that allow it to be, affords a kind of reiterative making, having, dis/possessing of meaning. But how might a knowing undo and would that be cast out under the term “archive”? I am not sure about unmaking or unraveling (because we get trapped in the “not” or relation in opposition to) but, perhaps, pulling at the (white) cloth as in America. A frustrated and confused endeavor of pulling at cloth that gets caught in the heat of the sun next to some white son. It is this pulling, tugging, “worrying the note” that I find so exciting, here (Jafa). I am not sure if it is necessarily about escaping “the position of the unthought,” or the unarchived, but leaning into it and pulling at the seams (Hartman and Wilderson). A denaturing that allows you to pull, not necessarily make or labor anew, but otherwise (after Crawley).
Can an archival encounter be anything but a replication of “the grammar of violence?” (4). Here, I am thinking of Ulises Carrión’s 1973 Dear Reader, Don’t Read; once we peer into or think about peering into are we trapped? And, if that is suffocatingly case, what can we make of an archival encounter that is somehow way too close to “the coincidence of the pleasures afforded in the space of death” (Hartman 5).
For this weeks post, I would like to share some notes with you I took during the screening of America:
> stylistic devices / techniques or means of film: d i s s o l v e (or: cross-fading) — a transition from one image (scene) to the next. This form of a conjoining transition is rather counter-intuitive to the meaning of the word, which derives from the Latin dissolvĕre ‘to loosen asunder, disunite’.
The O.E.D. adds up to this train of thought in quite wonderful ways: 1. To loosen or put asunder the parts of; to reduce to its formative elements; to destroy the physical integrity; to disintegrate, decompose. (…) 3. In various figurative applications of senses: esp. To melt or soften the heart or feelings of; to cause to ‘melt’ into tears, grief, etc.; to relax or enervate with pleasure, luxury, etc.; to immerse or absorb in some engrossing occupation. Chiefly in passive. (Now rare except in dissolved in tears, or in direct figures from sense.)
I am struck by the seemingly endless dissolves, and fades out and into, in Bradley’s 'America.' I think of the dissolving techniques here as a style of writing a certain Black history of America that holds the moment in which something is disappearing, but something new emerging in one place at the same time in endless suspense. Something, or someone, is subject to this triggered affect that is acting upon oneself, and therefore immersing and absorbing this self into something other, into feelings of grief, tears, or pleasure. America “evokes and echoes,” as Bradley says in an interview in ARTFORUM, “the spirit of what already exists.” It evokes and echoes a lot of life and vibrancy for me; eradicated and always emerging in the very same moment. “I see America as a template for how visual storytelling and the assembly of images can serve as an archive of the past and a document of the present,” Bradley states in the same interview. In looking specifically at the transitory techniques between the images, I would like to add to this, that the film functions equally as an archive from a possible future-past as well.
In placing this thought in conversation with Prof. Hartman’s question from last week, namely the question of “how we inhabit the structure of history,” I find it quite intriguing to think about the ‘dissolve’ as an utterance of the in-between, and the fabrication of the interstitial space of the interval that came up in our discussion numerous times.
> c l o t h and the f a b r i c of history
Other moments that struck me when watching the film are related to cloth and fabric, and the question of the materialization and fabrication of what is called America. In ending these rather preliminary remarks, I would like to share the opening part of an essay by Werner Hamacher about the 'lingua amissa' in Marx with you:
“—Cloth speaks. It is Marx who says that cloth speaks. And in saying that, he speaks the language of cloth, he speaks ‘from its soul’ as surely, in his assertion, as do the bourgeois economists he criticizes. Marx’s language is the language of cloth when he says ‘Cloth speaks.’ But in the language of Marx, this language of the cloth is at the same time translated into the analytical – and ironic – language of the critique of the very same political economy which defines the categories of cloth language.”
I wonder what language of cloth, what language of its soul, Bradley’s 'America' is speaking? What does the cloth has to say in her film, and how is the glaring whiteness of the cotton-cloth not just deeply woven into the blood-stained fabric of the history of America, but also draws and unravels the threads of Black life, that made such fabrications of a national-identity, the fabric of the American flag, possible in the first place.
I am fascinated by the anterior ambient, orchestral sound that affectively foregrounds my experience watching Garrett Bradley’s film “America.” This score sounds throughout the film, though breaking and returning often to sample radio-static sounds seemingly quintessential of Black Audio Film Collective composer Trevor Mathison (his influential work is worth a look if you have time). My particular interest with the musical score pertains to what it forecloses. The clearest example of occurs at 18:00, with the looping baseball scenes. As the figures appear and recurrently pan across the screen, the musical score breaks and cuts to the cheer of crowds, eventually transitioning to a trumpet-lead jazz number. As we see the players swing and slide, what is noticeably absent is the connecting sound of ball-to-bat and likewise sound of the capture of the glove closing around a motive baseball. What is absent is the auditory satisfaction of contact, which is not merely an artifact of this scene. Rather, throughout the film, this indexical sound is absented, therefore, producing a sense of gravity-less akin to the closing scenes of an appearing Bessie Coleman bouncing-and-twirling though the grayscale sky. I’m quite interested in thinking more about the genres of music Mathison invokes and the images in tandem, as well as what this tension in physics, if you will, seems to offer as critique of history, progress, and remembering.
I would like to think about the close ties between repetition, ceremony, and transformation, in order to relate these media to one another. With respect to the two films, I am thinking of the baptism scene in America as well as Bradley’s usage of Lime Kiln Field Day; with respect to “Venus in Two Acts”, I am thinking of the haunting opening phrase—in this incarnation, she appears in the archive of slavery as a dead girl (Hartman 1). My thoughts need expansion, but right now, what am I curious about is how the repetitiveness of black life is both what makes it ceremonial and what makes transformation necessary, if not inevitable. The ceremony of baptism becomes ceremonial through its repetition, since in some ways, ritual is only made meaningful after being done twice. Also ceremonial is the cutting of clips from Lime Kiln Field Day and inserting them into this modern documentary film. Thinking of our previous discussions of the cut, Lime Kiln Field Day’s usage exposes the repetitiveness of American black life while simultaneously moving to transform the film itself through its presence. The contemporary and historical film clips seem to almost circle around each other, as if the repetition reflected in both spheres enables a sort of encounter between the two.
This focus on encounter is very much again reflected in “Venus in Two Acts”, but what has always caught my attention was the choice of the words “in this incarnation” at the beginning. The idea of incarnation contains the ties between repetition, ceremony, and transformation in and of itself. Moreover, it holds the specificity of the word, or grammar, as Spillers might put it, directly together with the (seeming) capaciousness of (black, female) flesh— if incarnation is word transformed into flesh, how can that speak to the lack of distance between the way that blackness is articulated and the way that black people and their bodies feel? How might incarnation come to represent all the frequencies emitted by the shot of a pastor baptizing a man with a towel over his face, or by actors from Lime Kiln Field Day appearing to cheer on contemporary runners? From another perspective, how does attending to the lower frequencies allow us to see the ways in which a strip of cotton floating through the wind incarnates America as it is today?
Revisiting Venus and Two Acts as I move forward in thinking more about my own work, I am thinking about the ways in which my preoccupation with maroon figures and geographies as always bound up in these same archival questions. As I think across space and time I am always engaged in a history of slavery and a history of the present. How to write about attempts at freedom within and from enslavement, such as marronage, as sites of possibility without erasing or minimizing the precarity surrounding these attempts? At the same time, how do we prevent an acknowledgement of constraint and precarity from foreclosing the imaginative work that can be done through engaging these moves? How do we prevent the replication of capture? These are just a few questions provoked a by this reading of Venus in Two Acts, following some slight pushback I recently received around my engagement with marronage due to its limitations historically.
Moving to thinking with the text more specifically in relation to this course, I want to ask: What does the framework of frequency allow us to do with “the archive”, and how does it allow us to create alternative archives? Along with Prof. Hartman’s meditation, I see the framework of frequency as exposing the fictions of the archive through an analysis of the ways these fictions are legitimated by privileged modes of encounter. The framework of frequency is a “strategy for disordering and transgressing the protocols of the archive and the authority of its statements” (Hartman 9) through employing “new modes of writing, new modes of making-sensible” (Sharpe 2016:113). Thinking through frequency is a method of “counterintuition” (drawing on Listening to Images), a way of making sense that transgresses legitimated archival reading practices to access registers of black life that exceed capture. Prof. Hartman offers a grammatical mode of writing in the subjunctive tense, playing with a “conditional temporality” of “what could have been” which provides a new space for thinking and for interrogating the process of historical production. Playing with time, hearing, feeling, and seeing differently allows for a different approach to “the archive” and the creation of alternative archives.
I see Bradley’s America as a work of “jeopardiz[ing] the status of the event…displac[ing] the received or authorized account, and…imagin[ing] what might have happened” (Hartman 11). A description of the film argues that it “rewrites our visual history in the name of Black empowerment.” Taking Lime Kiln Field Day as a starting point performs both a “what could have been” but also a “what always has been.” Bradley draws from an archive of the everyday that we do have access to and imagines futures and pasts from there. This assembling of an archive of the everyday is in conversation with other artists we have engaged throughout the semester, such as DeCarava, Weems, Jafa, and Joseph. There are similarities across these assemblages, however each register different frequencies of black life in ways I’d be interested in thinking through more.
I am working on a glossary entry for “attunement” and have preliminary notes about the term below:
When frequencies collide in meaningful ways.
The rhythmic shift of phonic substance to respond to the pace, pitch and tone of another across striated landscapes of time and space.
Attunement is a concept that comes to mind when watching Garret Bradley’s America and witnessing the seamless blend of scenes from Lime Kiln Field Day fold into Bradley’s counterarchive of Black social life. The white cotton fabric blowing on the clothes line overlays on images of young rambunctious boys chasing, leaping, and bouncing off of one another; the white fabric wanes and the image of the Lime Kiln mother with white lace curtains framing her figure appears in the window chastising them through the imagined temporal bounds that otherwise would have them untethered. Bradley weaves together these fragments of Black social life that exceed the limited frame of the imperial archive and demonstrates the resilient rhythms that extend beyond the regimented logic of linear histories of progression. Bradley attunes her film to what exceeds it.
Borrowing from Tina Campt’s concept of adjacency as “the reparative work of transforming proximity into accountability; the labour of positioning oneself in relation to another in ways that revalue and redress complex histories of dispossession” attunement also addresses the ways in which the visual frequency of Black life reverberates amongst others in the global struggle for liberation. How can we attend to the transit of this frequency from Ferguson to Gaza? What is difference without separability, to borrow from Denise Ferreira da Silva? The phonic substance and visual iconography of the civil rights movement transcends the borders of America. What does it mean for Palestinians living in the highly segregated city of Al-Khalil (Hebron) in the occupied West Bank to protest President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel by desegregating the streets wearing t-shirst that read I have a dream and “Woke up this morning with my mind set on freedom” playing over a megaphone. The protestors were attacked by Israeli settlers and 9 Palestinians were detained by the occupation soldiers. The visual frequency of Black life is irreducible; it carries multitudes of opacities but nonetheless reverberates throughout the world.
In many ways, Arthur Jaffa’s Apex demonstrates the impossibility of attunement, as soon as we feel we can recognize and place an image it disappears. The reverberating pulse of the electronic beat propels us through the beautiful, the terrible, and the unbearable images of the weather of anti-blackness and the resilient refusals of Black life which exceed it without pause. The fixed quality attributed to photographs, the defining feature of the discovery of the medium, is violated as Jaffa moves us through what Tina Campt has defined as “still-moving images.” Attunement sounds close to like atonement, it gestures at repair through a common rhythmic alignment, but it also plays at the tension between between I hear you, I listen to you, and I resonate with you.
Here is a vimeo link to Garrett Bradley's film, America
ReplyDeletehttps://www.dropbox.com/s/rni7i2jq7z88i6r/AMERICA_2k_ST.mov?dl=0
PW: campt
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ReplyDeleteAs we continue to look at cinematic art and turn to Garrett Bradley’s short film "America," our questions around representation and replication of visual logic (the gaze) persist. Bradley seems keenly aware of this issue at the start of her film, which begins with a moment of transition from still images to moving ones. By freezing images from "Lime Kiln Field Day" then progressing to the scene of a merry-go-round, Bradley announces that her work will not only have something to say about black life, here shown at play, but about its relation to cinema as an art form. In addition to the merry-go-round, which recalls perhaps the zoopraxiscope, an early incarnation of cinema that projected image through light and circular motion, we could say that Bradley invokes a cinematographic style and engages particular imagery throughout "America" that highlight filmic qualities of light and shadow, for instance a white screen painted with flowers behind which dark figures play or the dreamlike rotation of disco balls. This is to say that she stages the crisis that black life—intramural black life, that is, for much of her runtime—poses both for the categories of Man or Nation, but moreover for cinema itself as a medium whose very language was elaborated in and as a racializing or racialized logic.
ReplyDeleteTo repeat what Keeling said, an “unequal calculus of visibility distribution” mandates that entry into the domain of visibility, or wielding cinema as a racialized director, may cost in effect the reproduction of power and the visual logics (the gaze again) that prop it up. To recall Keeling once more who invokes Grace Hong, Bradley may then engage, perhaps, the notion of queer production insofar as she imagines an alternative history of black life in and beyond its filmic representation. By reimagining the American past and black life within that history, she gestures toward the possibility that, against the “media ecology” of blackness, as Keeling put it, or the “Weather” as Sharpe wrote, the futurity endemic to these atmospheric terms could hold otherwise than what the cinema as a racial logic historically demands.
ReplyDeleteIn the spirit of revisiting some of the terminology we’ve compiled so far this term, I’d like to return to Wesley Brown’s “tragic magic” as described by Author Jafa in Black Visual Intonation:
What does Wesley Brown’s “tragic magic” mean when he says, “I played in a Bar Mitzvah band. And it was a great job until I got hit by that tragic magic, and I started playing a little bit before the beat, a little bit behind the beat. I couldn’t help myself. I lost the job.”
I’m interested in the compulsion implied by “I couldn’t help myself.” I find a similar compulsion in Dionne Brand’s “Verso 4,” who cannot help but to traverse the same furrow in time over and over again. The sentence that begins the Verso is like an itch that she just can’t quite scratch; or rather, an itch that—once scratched—results in a new, unforeseeable and unexpected pleasure in some surprising part of the body, and never that part with the itch you hoped to satisfy.
If I were to define “Tragic Magic” as a storytelling strategy—whether your mode of telling is film, image, or literary—I would borrow from Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” and describe it as the compulsion to fail the “requirements of narrative” and thus also “the fictions of history” (Hartman 10). By “failing” to follow the terminus of her own narrative, Dionne Brand refuses to close the gaps and delineate the thread between this itch and that scratch. With what Hartman calls “narrative restraint,” Brand opens her readers to the tragic magic of opacity and excess.
But again, what do we make of this compulsion? Do we read the repeated return to the white cotton, the revolving doors, the spoken refrains in Garrett Bradley’s film “America” as compulsive? Must it be in order for us to deem it as being “hit by” a kind of tragic magic?
Heather, Lilith, Sherena, Susana, Ricardo:
ReplyDelete“Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive?” (Hartman 11).
Taking this question from “Venus in Two Acts” as our point of departure, we have drafted the following questions and compiled the additional materials listed below to help shape the dialogue we will have tomorrow together. Please review them at your convenience and reflect beforehand or throughout our short presentation tomorrow when we will return to these guiding questions and outline the tensions, repetitions, erasures, and fabulations that motivated the directions our collaborative presentation has taken and will continue to take with your added input:
1. What does structuring the archive around quotidian black life (as opposed to death, racialization, the law, accounting, authority, knowledge, etc.) look like?
2. What does it mean for a work to be both an archive and a project of critical fabulation?
3. How might the archive be exceeded?
4. How can we engage with the archive in a way that acknowledges and refuses the complicity of archival structures and knowledge formation in the foundational violence of slavery?
5. What is it to break the relationship between the past and present that the archive presupposes/imposes?
(bonus question): what is the pedagogical value of the archive or considering the archive in the ways “Venus in Two Acts” asks of us?
Resources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puH26jx-A24
https://hyperallergic.com/522026/garrett-bradley-america-bam/
https://www.culturedmag.com/garrett-bradley/
“Filho Bastardo”, Adriana Varejão
“Assentamento”, Rosana Paulino
Preface and Forward to “The Black Book,” ed. Toni Morrison
The flickering visual noise or static of film stock (graininess, scratches, blips, and flashes of light), its excess and its transient opacities, is ubiquitous in a film like "Lime Kiln Field Day." A practice of looking structured around the transparency of the relation between viewer and image would strive to tune out these scratches, grains, blips, and flashes, even though they inflect the texture and temporality of moving images and worry the note just as much as varying frame rates. America seems to ask us to tune into that noise, just like the girl who tunes into the radio frequency that flickers between Amiri Baraka’s demand for something more real than reality (“…reality is an excerpt on Television… What I want is me. For real”) and the song’s refrain of the “real gone” as in an out-of-the-field home run but also, maybe, as the really-not-there of loss (“Yes, Yes Jackie [Robinson]’s real gone”). If this static is not stable, as one definition of static would suggest, its disturbance is nonetheless constant. Its pervasiveness gestures toward an ambience (perhaps related to the weather via Sharpe) that simultaneously marks the limits of visibility offered through the medium of film stock yet also affords a way to begin imagining the textures of visual noise as some aspect of the unpreserved archive that remains invisible (insofar as we do not have access to these films) yet which would have been a constitutive aspect of all these lost films, given the material (in this case, rendered animal fat, which introduce another dimension of violence to consider when viewing any cinematic archive of the era) available to render images in this period.
ReplyDeleteIf we think of "America" as an experiment in critical fabulation, then we could consider ways that the film’s attunement to static ambience might take up what Saidiya Hartman considers an ethical and methodological imperative “to respect black noise, the shrieks, the moans, the nonsense, and the opacity, which are always in excess of legibility and of the law and which hint at and embody aspirations that are wildly utopian, derelict to capitalism, and antithetical to its attendant discourse of Man” (12). Of course, the film itself is comprised of characters and scenes that are integral to Bradley’s efforts to imagine some possible and probable subjects of films in the era and the work of representation they become involved in. At the same time, "America" brims with flickering lights and sounds that seem to invaginate "Lime Kiln Field Day’s" static frequencies and the abyss of the unpreserved cinematic archive. This rendering of flickering what might be called visual, sonic, and haptic scintillations. Where it transpires, these scintillations could be a way of cutting and augmenting (like Moten) what lies in the wake of this abyss; they could be an attempt to cut and keep the excess within the frame (like Micheaux) as a way of oscillating (like Sharpe) between imaging and imagining what or who one looks with, through, and after (Moten and Keeley); it perhaps is a way of preferring “both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling” (Hartman 11). Here, I offer “scintillation” as a possible term that attempts to look through, with, and after a mosaic or murmuration of that which sparkles, crackles, glimmers, twinkles, chirps (of insects, birds, computers), drips, scratches, creaks, and flutters as possible transient glimpses of “embod[ied] aspirations” that are different yet not separate from each other in their rapid fluctuations (Hartman, OED “scintillation”).
The transience of these scintillations also seem related to visual and sonic turnings and twirlings, which render (which can also carries a sense of returning and the giving of thanks in return for receiving some generosity) a temporality of repetition, returning, and the practice of giving thanks in gathering in some shared grace. Scintillation and turning frequently appear and are celebrated together: the spinning lights of disco balls at roller rink; the sequins of the baton twirler’s outfit; the successive chirps of birds and insects; the repeated snippets of “America versus the United States” and briefly surface from the static; the glitter of the baptismal water that ebbs and flows like the shimmering shadows of the trees that dance over the "Lime Kiln Club’s" parade; the glimmer of sunlight on the revolving merry-go-round. I don’t know what to make of these frequencies, their intervals, their scintillations, other than to say that "America" gestures in excess of the constitutive limits of the archive it engages even as it dwells immanent to frames available to conjure this articulation. This gesture acts as another mode of imagining and listening to the static frequencies that strain visions of the impossibilities and possibilities of black life.
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ReplyDeleteWhat gaps are left by an "annihilating violence"? How "to dramatize the production of nothing"? (Hartman 4). These are questions I had in my mind while watching Garrett Bradley's "America". Like Ben, I also was struck by this passage from "Venus in Two Acts":
ReplyDelete"Narrative restraint, the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure, is a requirement of this method, as is the imperative to respect black noise - the shrieks, the moans, the nonsense, and the opacity...which hint at and embody aspirations that are wildly utopian, derelict to capitalism, and antithetical to its attendant discourse of Man” (12).
The white noise in Garrett Bradley’s "America" is actually black noise. White noise, according to this Wikipedia entry, is defined as:
"the 'sh' noise produced by a signal containing all audible frequencies of vibration—is sometimes used as a colloquialism to describe a backdrop of ambient sound, creating an indistinct commotion, seamless in such way no specific sounds composing it as a continuum can be isolated as a veritable instance of some defined familiar sound so that masks or obliterates underlying information. "
I find this definition of white noise fascinating and incredibly helpful in thinking about "America", especially the first and last lines: “a signal containing all audible frequencies of vibration...that masks or obliterates underlying information.” In this one definition, black/white noise comprises both plentitude and a force of annihilation.
Black/white noise comprises much of "America’s" soundscape, and its slight disjointedness from the actions being shown produces an unnerving effect.. As if the sounds were coming from somewhere else. (It reminded me, a little, of how Red snaps on counts 1 and 3 to a song during a car ride in Jordan "Us" instead of beats 2 and 4, because she grew up Tethered and thus wouldn’t know that people ‘above ground’ learned to snap their fingers on counts 2 and 4.)
The tearing, in particular, sounds like black noise to me. The tearing sound of the white, cotton cloth (around 2”55’ in the film) immediately made me think of the beginning and closing scenes in Octavia Butler’s "Kindred" when Dana loses her arm, presumably because her white master Rufus grabs her wrist as she time-travels from the 1820s to her present day--a tear in time and history that, as Hartman writes, calls to the fore that “the arrangements of power occlude the very object that we desire to rescue” (14). The past stretches into the present and writes the future while those in the present recognise “that some part of the self is missing” (Hartman 14). Similarly, when the young girl tunes the radio to much static, I think she is actually craning her ear to hear the black noise.
In our return to Lime Kiln Field Day via America, I was struck by the overlapping movement and stillness at work in the first several minutes of the film. Bradley begins her film with still images against a sonic backdrop of movement: the sound of a door opening and closing, the crossing over and across a threshold whose visual material is withheld from the audience. But the first moving images in the film continue to play with movement and stillness. Bert Williams and his partner ride the carousel, in constant movement but never going anywhere, if one is watching with the imperative to move forward. What particularly interested me in this rewatching of Williams, however, is how after thirty seconds of circling around on the wooden horse, he reaches out and grabs a small white ring.
ReplyDeleteThis reaching outside of the circumscribed path led me to think back to Sharpe’s description of the weather as singularity, as that which draws everything around it. Wake work takes place on the edges of the singularity, and Williams reaching out to grab the ring seems almost like a kind of proto-wake work: an insistence that the cyclic movement of the carousel (which compels its riders to keep their arms and legs inside the ride until it has come to a complete stop) can in fact be momentarily broken.
If, following the second question that Heather, Lilith, Sherena, Susana, and Ricardo raise, if we consider America both archive and critical fabulation, is this particular footage of Williams used to mark the move from archive to fabulation?
In thinking of Garrett Bradley’s ‘America’ alongside “Venus in Two Acts,” I’m drawn back to our discussions in the joint meeting at Columbia (seems like so long ago!) around questions of the chronicle versus narrative-developmental schema. Referring specifically to the visible cuts that act as intervals in ‘Lime Kiln Field Day,’ we pondered whether an “archival assembly” as a methodology with curatorial intention always points to that which is left out—a subjunctive temporality of form that outlines the possibilities of what could have been. Given the peculiar nature of the cuts in ‘Lime Kiln’ by virtue of their slowed-down frame rate and the indistinguishability between their state as still or moving images, I want to add a question. Both in this film and in light of the other works of assemblage that we’ve watched throughout the seminar, is there a tendency to assign the quality of chronicle to the photograph, and narrative to film? How do we re-consider these forms of storytelling in light of previous conversations around the intensity of the cinematic as opposed to the theatrical?
ReplyDeleteThese narrative tensions play out to a significant degree in Bradley’s film, which mines the archive to reconstruct a kind of future history, perhaps enacting what Hartman calls jeopardizing the event (11). The film does this by channeling hegemonic signifiers like the white cloth or boy scout and military uniforms through purposefully obscuring visual tools of the mirror or camera glare, and sonic ones such as the weaving in and out of diegetic soundscapes and the voiceover. The film, in its refusal to let image and sound converge perfectly, to linger on tonalities of skin, cloth, and gravity-defying daggers as much as on human figures, performs a kind of flattening that “Venus in Two Acts” describes as “confusing narrators and speakers … to topple the hierarchy of discourse, and to engulf authorized speech in the clash of voices” (12). This submersion of voices, the sound of symphonic drone notes, the unfulfilled aural moment of a hammer hitting an anvil, and the refrain which questions the difference between America and the United States proffers a new assembly of the archive by listening for the interval rather than for narrative emphasis. Bradley thus performs a practice of black annotation as put forth by Christina Sharpe, an act of (re)writing a history that is at once a cut between chronicle and progressive development.
I’m not entirely convinced, however, as to how the mixing of footage and stills from ‘Lime Kiln’ functions in the assemblage of the film, and whether its appearances are meant to “haunt the present” (Hartman 5). In an interview with Artforum, Bradley explains that she became interested in the catalytic potential of ‘Lime Kiln’ after learning from a Library of Congress survey that seventy percent of films made between 1912 and 1929 went missing. She thus begins to imagine, taking 1913’s ‘Lime Kiln’ as a germinating point, an alternative archive of media surrounding black life, bringing us back to the question of subjunctive temporality and what can be made possible through assembly.
Recently, I have been thinking about the object, person, experience, letter, etc. that was not “put to rest” and does not want to be found.
ReplyDeleteTwo initial scattered thoughts:
-I hear the aquatic dream sounds of Isaac Julien’s 1989 Looking for Langston in the opening scenes of Garrett Bradley's America. I place this in conversation with “The task of writing the impossible, (not the fanciful or the utopian but ‘histories rendered unreal and fantastic’)” (Hartman 14).
-I am thinking about America’s relation to touch, water, the hands, and mouth. Our moment’s constant hand washing places self in relation and then in communion with water and soap in frenzied touch.
I am interested in the practice of searching or looking for something with the latent desire of to make sense of one’s own self in relation. Professor Hartman asks, “Why subject the dead to new dangers and to a second order of violence?” (5). There could be two, amongst many, rather choppy and incomplete responses: 1.) to make right a horrific wrong 2.) to have more narratives of the dispossessed present. They are both sticky with ethics but, more uneasily perhaps, they cycle around possession. That is, to have and to hold an archive, regardless of the absences and presences that allow it to be, affords a kind of reiterative making, having, dis/possessing of meaning. But how might a knowing undo and would that be cast out under the term “archive”? I am not sure about unmaking or unraveling (because we get trapped in the “not” or relation in opposition to) but, perhaps, pulling at the (white) cloth as in America. A frustrated and confused endeavor of pulling at cloth that gets caught in the heat of the sun next to some white son. It is this pulling, tugging, “worrying the note” that I find so exciting, here (Jafa). I am not sure if it is necessarily about escaping “the position of the unthought,” or the unarchived, but leaning into it and pulling at the seams (Hartman and Wilderson). A denaturing that allows you to pull, not necessarily make or labor anew, but otherwise (after Crawley).
Can an archival encounter be anything but a replication of “the grammar of violence?” (4). Here, I am thinking of Ulises Carrión’s 1973 Dear Reader, Don’t Read; once we peer into or think about peering into are we trapped? And, if that is suffocatingly case, what can we make of an archival encounter that is somehow way too close to “the coincidence of the pleasures afforded in the space of death” (Hartman 5).
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ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteFor this weeks post, I would like to share some notes with you I took during the screening of America:
ReplyDelete> stylistic devices / techniques or means of film: d i s s o l v e (or: cross-fading) — a transition from one image (scene) to the next. This form of a conjoining transition is rather counter-intuitive to the meaning of the word, which derives from the Latin dissolvĕre ‘to loosen asunder, disunite’.
The O.E.D. adds up to this train of thought in quite wonderful ways: 1. To loosen or put asunder the parts of; to reduce to its formative elements; to destroy the physical integrity; to disintegrate, decompose. (…) 3. In various figurative applications of senses: esp. To melt or soften the heart or feelings of; to cause to ‘melt’ into tears, grief, etc.; to relax or enervate with pleasure, luxury, etc.; to immerse or absorb in some engrossing occupation. Chiefly in passive. (Now rare except in dissolved in tears, or in direct figures from sense.)
I am struck by the seemingly endless dissolves, and fades out and into, in Bradley’s 'America.' I think of the dissolving techniques here as a style of writing a certain Black history of America that holds the moment in which something is disappearing, but something new emerging in one place at the same time in endless suspense. Something, or someone, is subject to this triggered affect that is acting upon oneself, and therefore immersing and absorbing this self into something other, into feelings of grief, tears, or pleasure. America “evokes and echoes,” as Bradley says in an interview in ARTFORUM, “the spirit of what already exists.” It evokes and echoes a lot of life and vibrancy for me; eradicated and always emerging in the very same moment. “I see America as a template for how visual storytelling and the assembly of images can serve as an archive of the past and a document of the present,” Bradley states in the same interview. In looking specifically at the transitory techniques between the images, I would like to add to this, that the film functions equally as an archive from a possible future-past as well.
In placing this thought in conversation with Prof. Hartman’s question from last week, namely the question of “how we inhabit the structure of history,” I find it quite intriguing to think about the ‘dissolve’ as an utterance of the in-between, and the fabrication of the interstitial space of the interval that came up in our discussion numerous times.
> c l o t h and the f a b r i c of history
Other moments that struck me when watching the film are related to cloth and fabric, and the question of the materialization and fabrication of what is called America. In ending these rather preliminary remarks, I would like to share the opening part of an essay by Werner Hamacher about the 'lingua amissa' in Marx with you:
“—Cloth speaks. It is Marx who says that cloth speaks. And in saying that, he speaks the language of cloth, he speaks ‘from its soul’ as surely, in his assertion, as do the bourgeois economists he criticizes. Marx’s language is the language of cloth when he says ‘Cloth speaks.’ But in the language of Marx, this language of the cloth is at the same time translated into the analytical – and ironic – language of the critique of the very same political economy which defines the categories of cloth language.”
I wonder what language of cloth, what language of its soul, Bradley’s 'America' is speaking? What does the cloth has to say in her film, and how is the glaring whiteness of the cotton-cloth not just deeply woven into the blood-stained fabric of the history of America, but also draws and unravels the threads of Black life, that made such fabrications of a national-identity, the fabric of the American flag, possible in the first place.
I am fascinated by the anterior ambient, orchestral sound that affectively foregrounds my experience watching Garrett Bradley’s film “America.” This score sounds throughout the film, though breaking and returning often to sample radio-static sounds seemingly quintessential of Black Audio Film Collective composer Trevor Mathison (his influential work is worth a look if you have time). My particular interest with the musical score pertains to what it forecloses. The clearest example of occurs at 18:00, with the looping baseball scenes. As the figures appear and recurrently pan across the screen, the musical score breaks and cuts to the cheer of crowds, eventually transitioning to a trumpet-lead jazz number. As we see the players swing and slide, what is noticeably absent is the connecting sound of ball-to-bat and likewise sound of the capture of the glove closing around a motive baseball. What is absent is the auditory satisfaction of contact, which is not merely an artifact of this scene. Rather, throughout the film, this indexical sound is absented, therefore, producing a sense of gravity-less akin to the closing scenes of an appearing Bessie Coleman bouncing-and-twirling though the grayscale sky. I’m quite interested in thinking more about the genres of music Mathison invokes and the images in tandem, as well as what this tension in physics, if you will, seems to offer as critique of history, progress, and remembering.
ReplyDeleteI would like to think about the close ties between repetition, ceremony, and transformation, in order to relate these media to one another. With respect to the two films, I am thinking of the baptism scene in America as well as Bradley’s usage of Lime Kiln Field Day; with respect to “Venus in Two Acts”, I am thinking of the haunting opening phrase—in this incarnation, she appears in the archive of slavery as a dead girl (Hartman 1). My thoughts need expansion, but right now, what am I curious about is how the repetitiveness of black life is both what makes it ceremonial and what makes transformation necessary, if not inevitable. The ceremony of baptism becomes ceremonial through its repetition, since in some ways, ritual is only made meaningful after being done twice. Also ceremonial is the cutting of clips from Lime Kiln Field Day and inserting them into this modern documentary film. Thinking of our previous discussions of the cut, Lime Kiln Field Day’s usage exposes the repetitiveness of American black life while simultaneously moving to transform the film itself through its presence. The contemporary and historical film clips seem to almost circle around each other, as if the repetition reflected in both spheres enables a sort of encounter between the two.
ReplyDeleteThis focus on encounter is very much again reflected in “Venus in Two Acts”, but what has always caught my attention was the choice of the words “in this incarnation” at the beginning. The idea of incarnation contains the ties between repetition, ceremony, and transformation in and of itself. Moreover, it holds the specificity of the word, or grammar, as Spillers might put it, directly together with the (seeming) capaciousness of (black, female) flesh— if incarnation is word transformed into flesh, how can that speak to the lack of distance between the way that blackness is articulated and the way that black people and their bodies feel? How might incarnation come to represent all the frequencies emitted by the shot of a pastor baptizing a man with a towel over his face, or by actors from Lime Kiln Field Day appearing to cheer on contemporary runners? From another perspective, how does attending to the lower frequencies allow us to see the ways in which a strip of cotton floating through the wind incarnates America as it is today?
Revisiting Venus and Two Acts as I move forward in thinking more about my own work, I am thinking about the ways in which my preoccupation with maroon figures and geographies as always bound up in these same archival questions. As I think across space and time I am always engaged in a history of slavery and a history of the present. How to write about attempts at freedom within and from enslavement, such as marronage, as sites of possibility without erasing or minimizing the precarity surrounding these attempts? At the same time, how do we prevent an acknowledgement of constraint and precarity from foreclosing the imaginative work that can be done through engaging these moves? How do we prevent the replication of capture? These are just a few questions provoked a by this reading of Venus in Two Acts, following some slight pushback I recently received around my engagement with marronage due to its limitations historically.
ReplyDeleteMoving to thinking with the text more specifically in relation to this course, I want to ask: What does the framework of frequency allow us to do with “the archive”, and how does it allow us to create alternative archives? Along with Prof. Hartman’s meditation, I see the framework of frequency as exposing the fictions of the archive through an analysis of the ways these fictions are legitimated by privileged modes of encounter. The framework of frequency is a “strategy for disordering and transgressing the protocols of the archive and the authority of its statements” (Hartman 9) through employing “new modes of writing, new modes of making-sensible” (Sharpe 2016:113). Thinking through frequency is a method of “counterintuition” (drawing on Listening to Images), a way of making sense that transgresses legitimated archival reading practices to access registers of black life that exceed capture. Prof. Hartman offers a grammatical mode of writing in the subjunctive tense, playing with a “conditional temporality” of “what could have been” which provides a new space for thinking and for interrogating the process of historical production. Playing with time, hearing, feeling, and seeing differently allows for a different approach to “the archive” and the creation of alternative archives.
I see Bradley’s America as a work of “jeopardiz[ing] the status of the event…displac[ing] the received or authorized account, and…imagin[ing] what might have happened” (Hartman 11). A description of the film argues that it “rewrites our visual history in the name of Black empowerment.” Taking Lime Kiln Field Day as a starting point performs both a “what could have been” but also a “what always has been.” Bradley draws from an archive of the everyday that we do have access to and imagines futures and pasts from there. This assembling of an archive of the everyday is in conversation with other artists we have engaged throughout the semester, such as DeCarava, Weems, Jafa, and Joseph. There are similarities across these assemblages, however each register different frequencies of black life in ways I’d be interested in thinking through more.
I am working on a glossary entry for “attunement” and have preliminary notes about the term below:
ReplyDeleteWhen frequencies collide in meaningful ways.
The rhythmic shift of phonic substance to respond to the pace, pitch and tone of another across striated landscapes of time and space.
Attunement is a concept that comes to mind when watching Garret Bradley’s America and witnessing the seamless blend of scenes from Lime Kiln Field Day fold into Bradley’s counterarchive of Black social life. The white cotton fabric blowing on the clothes line overlays on images of young rambunctious boys chasing, leaping, and bouncing off of one another; the white fabric wanes and the image of the Lime Kiln mother with white lace curtains framing her figure appears in the window chastising them through the imagined temporal bounds that otherwise would have them untethered. Bradley weaves together these fragments of Black social life that exceed the limited frame of the imperial archive and demonstrates the resilient rhythms that extend beyond the regimented logic of linear histories of progression. Bradley attunes her film to what exceeds it.
Borrowing from Tina Campt’s concept of adjacency as “the reparative work of transforming proximity into accountability; the labour of positioning oneself in relation to another in ways that revalue and redress complex histories of dispossession” attunement also addresses the ways in which the visual frequency of Black life reverberates amongst others in the global struggle for liberation. How can we attend to the transit of this frequency from Ferguson to Gaza? What is difference without separability, to borrow from Denise Ferreira da Silva? The phonic substance and visual iconography of the civil rights movement transcends the borders of America. What does it mean for Palestinians living in the highly segregated city of Al-Khalil (Hebron) in the occupied West Bank to protest President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel by desegregating the streets wearing t-shirst that read I have a dream and “Woke up this morning with my mind set on freedom” playing over a megaphone. The protestors were attacked by Israeli settlers and 9 Palestinians were detained by the occupation soldiers. The visual frequency of Black life is irreducible; it carries multitudes of opacities but nonetheless reverberates throughout the world.
In many ways, Arthur Jaffa’s Apex demonstrates the impossibility of attunement, as soon as we feel we can recognize and place an image it disappears. The reverberating pulse of the electronic beat propels us through the beautiful, the terrible, and the unbearable images of the weather of anti-blackness and the resilient refusals of Black life which exceed it without pause. The fixed quality attributed to photographs, the defining feature of the discovery of the medium, is violated as Jaffa moves us through what Tina Campt has defined as “still-moving images.” Attunement sounds close to like atonement, it gestures at repair through a common rhythmic alignment, but it also plays at the tension between between I hear you, I listen to you, and I resonate with you.